What about short stories?

I’m very grateful to my friend David Angus for asking me about short stories.  He’s right to bring them up — they’re very important and can be incredibly useful.

First up, I love them — particularly listening to them in the car.  A novel may seem great for a long journey but my attention can wander (as it should if I’m concentrating on staying safe and actually getting to where I’m supposed to be going!) but short stories provide enough short-burst energy and variety to keep me interested without distracting me. I got through most of Chekhov’s short stories this way and a very good collection called ‘That Glimpse of Truth: 100 of the Finest Short Stories Ever Written’.  By the way, does anyone else think that the ‘Ever Written’ is totally unnecessary?  Of course they’ve been written!  Makes it sound a bit cheap too, as though it’s ‘Now That’s What I Call Short Stories, Volume 39’.  The collection is actually a lot better than that and a good taster for authors you might not have come across.

As far as your own writing is concerned, you can use short stories as exercises, warm-ups or try-outs for ideas that might turn into chapters of something longer or even as models to expand into a whole novel.  There is a history of this.  One example: Virginia Woolf’s novel ‘Mrs Dalloway’ began life as a short story (published first in its own right), ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’.  A long short story (with an unfinished one added to it) turned into a short novel.

There are also whole novels structured with short stories for each chapter.  As is obvious from its title, I’m thinking in particular of ‘Olive Kitteridge: A Novel in Stories’ by Elizabeth Strout (and her subsequent works too), where Olive is the main character but in some cases only drifts into a chapter by way of a guest appearance.  The novel is as much about the small Maine community in which it’s set as it is about Olive and her family.  In this respect, it’s like a kind of contemporary version of ‘Winesburg, Ohio’ by Sherwood Anderson, published in 1919.

One of the biggest attractions of short-story writing has to be the sheer number of competitions that you can enter, many of them with pretty big prizes.  The downside is that the prizes are big because you pay to enter.  That said, it’s not a con.  These are genuine and highly-regarded and some of them, like the BBC National Short Story Award, are even free.  There are easily-searchable lists of competitions online with details of dates and entry fees (for example at the Neon Books website: www.neonbooks.org.uk/big-list-writing-competitions).  The benefits are obvious: the deadline provides a motivation to finish and the word-limit is a great exercise in structuring and editing your work to perfection.

A friend of mine found her route into mainstream publication through short stories.  She did well in a competition and was spotted by an agent.  In time, and because she’s also a very good writer, this led to a publishing deal — so those short stories were absolutely worth the time and effort.  Her books may never have got into bookshops without those years of writing short stories first.

So there we go.  Next time, as previously promised, I’ll look at whether it’s worth trying to get an agent.  Happy writing!